January 12, 2009

Common Council President Willie Hines, Jr. contributed a thoughtful piece to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel on the weekend.

It concludes:

Far too many of our children are maturing into adulthood without even engaging in a scholarly discussion of ethics. They are losing out — and so are the rest of us. When we ignore what is moral, we are not being amoral. We are being immoral.

It's anyone's guess why it should be difficult to discuss ethics and morality without invoking God. Many of us do it all the time. McIlheran fails to explain why that is, but he does claim to understand the reason why we mustn't:

[Eighty thousand Milwaukee public school students], because of a certain narrow-minded secularity in American political culture, can’t mention God.

McIlheran goes on to bemoan the lack of "Judeo-Christian" curricula in government schools which, last I checked, are available to children (and adults) of any and all ethnic and cultural persuasions.

That public school students "can't mention God" is both complete nonsense and absurdist "right-wing guy" paranoia, obviously.

And the only certain narrow-mindedness in evidence is Patrick McIlheran's woeful inability — at contraposition to Alderman Hines's sensible pragmatism — to conjure an ethic free from alleged supernatural commands and threats of otherworldly damnation.

(Indeed, one searches the criminal statutes of Wisconsin in vain for even a single "Thou shalt not" or a Misdemeanor Class H for Hell.)

The best comfort can be said about those that are so narrow minded in their understanding and application of ethics, is the reassurance that their also narrow minded offspring will be just another conservative minority defending themselves in a federal district court on an ethics charge.